The tone of the new film, Red
Dragon, is made clear from the start, a prologue where the
camera zooms in on the face of Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins --
you were expecting Percy Kilbride?) wincing while listening to a
wayward flautist playing with the Baltimore Symphony, followed by a
formal at-home dinner where the symphony trustees exude over the
wonderful "soirées" Lecter has thrown for them. (Don't eat
anything! we're supposed to scream.) Enter Will Graham (Edward
Norton), an F.B.I. agent who is visiting Lecter for his services as
a "forensics consultant", then figures out that he's been killing
and cooking people. A messy struggle, and the story-proper finally
gets underway.

And that's pretty much the rest of
the movie: queasy attempts at macabre humor, flurries of action, and
crass shock effects. This is the second film version of Thomas
Harris' novel, which was already very finely served by Michael
Mann's 1986 film, a comparison made cruelly evident by both films
sharing much of the same scene progression and, in some instances,
the same dialogue. Also, the emphasis of the new film has been
shifted over to Will Graham and Lecter, even though the original
story was about the inevitable confrontation between Graham and the
serial killer he was trying to capture, Francis Dolarhyde, who
commits murders in order to transform himself into a higher being.
This rearranging results in the film skittering over a great deal of
the plot and most of the characters, rendering them meaningless
while squandering a ludicrously talented cast: Ralph Fiennes is
reduced to nothing more than a hare-lip and a monstrous back tattoo
as Dolarhyde, Philip Seymour Hoffman gets an extended whining scene
as a tabloid journalist, Mary-Louise Parker gets even less than that
playing Graham's anguished wife, and Emily Watson, as the blind girl
whom Dolarhyde falls for, is made to look wide-eyed and idiotic from
the way her scenes are staged and shot. (Especially painful, if you
saw Joan Allen's portrayal of the same character, in Mann's film,
and found it exceptional.)

The film confirms that director
Brett Ratner is, well, not exactly going to be joining the pantheon
of Jonathan Demme and Ridley Scott, just yet. (In a TV interview, he
admitted that he was intimidated by the actors and in trying to give
them direction.) He's unsubtle in his approach., to say the least.
Unable to draw out characterization or nuance, he turns the movie
into a circus parade: on to the next grotesquerie, the nest phony
surprise plot twist! (All of it accompanied, jarringly, by a grossly
overblown music score by Danny Elfman.) As for the scenes between
Will Graham and Lecter upon which the fulcrum sits, Norton fumbles
his way through the role, while Hopkins uses a glassy stare and a
sibilant speech delivery to, again, portray the bloodthirsty
maniac-as-epicurean. The power of the scenes between Jodie Foster
and Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs is but a mere shadow,
here: Hopkins and Norton look about as well-matched as an iguana and
a ladybug.

I assume Hopkins agreed to reprise
this role because it gave him the chance to realize the full arc of
a character, from beginning to end. Hopkins was reticent to talk
about Lecter during much of the 1990s, much like Ian Richardson, who
was concerned that people were idolizing his performance as Francis
Urquart, the evil prime minister in House of Cards, for the
wrong reasons. Richardson agreed to play the part a third time only
under the condition that the character was killed. Whereas
Richardson's villain retained his maleficent complexity to the end,
Lecter has become fairly obvious. Devour or be devoured, as long as
you always make sure that the right wine is served and you're using
the correct silverware and table manners. These niceties, of course,
never stood in the way of Bundy, Dahmer, Manson, Gein, Christie, or
even Jack the Ripper himself, and they remain tantamount to the
epitome of evil in the last century or more, not to mention the man
with the little mustache (and he was a vegetarian, at that). It may
be time to set Hannibal Lecter in a corner for a while.